No, there is a greater horror than vanilla dayenu--it's the INVADING DAYENU. "There was a farmer had a dog...day day enu..." I'm at a payphone trying to call home dayenu day e nu dayenu...". I HAD THIS A FEW WEEKS AGO THE HORROR THE HORROR every song on the radio, every song in the shower, I got so desperate, I tried to change it to eliahu ha navi, and that just made it woooorse
okay so SCENES FROM A JEWISH UPBRINGING: every year without fail on passover my father leads my whole family in a lackluster and exasperated rendition of chad gadya, which, for the non-jews among you, is basically "this is the house that jack built" but to music and with hebrew. it's about a little goat, purchased at the cost of two zuzim, that i personally would enjoy going back in time and removing from history, time-space continuum be damned. by the time we get to the last verse (which, for the record, goes like this: "then came the lord, blessed be he, who smote the angel of death, who slew the slaughterer, who killed the ox, who drank the water, that extinguished the fire, that burnt the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the goat, that my father bought for two zuzim. chad gadyaaaaaaaa," we do not fuck around with our agonizingly repetitive songs or, apparently, the digestive power of our cats) nobody in my family can remember all the words of all of the verses and we are all bitterly crunching on our matzo and regretting our genetics and/or marriage choices.
BUT I TELL YOU THAT TO TELL YOU THIS: while the invading dayenu is terrible (i consider that part of the overall horror of dayenu), i have actually OUT LOUD said "chad gadya" without meaning to because of this tradition. like. people will start listing things and it'll match up in my head with the dragging half-sung pace of that annual family sing-a-long, and i will AGAINST MY WILL begin to sing it regardless of whether or not the person listing things is jewish/has ever heard it/knows me well enough to dismiss my strangeness as commonplace. I DID THIS TO A BOSS ONCE. as such, while dayenu is clearly the eviler of the two songs, chad gadya will forever be my greatest enemy in terms of invading songs. its power transcends the power of my mental filter and i am frightened of it.
